this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2023
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Unity announces its revamped pricing model | After outcry from the gaming community, Unity revealed a new plan that’s a drastic departure from what was initially announced. (www.theverge.com)
submitted 1 year ago by L4s@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Unity announces its revamped pricing model | After outcry from the gaming community, Unity revealed a new plan that’s a drastic departure from what was initially announced.::Unity has introduced a revamped version of its new pricing model. The updated pricing scheme arrives a little more than a week after the disastrous original announcement that infuriated developers.

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[–] gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 94 points 1 year ago

Lol it’s not a “drastic departure”. All they did was to remove some of the passages that were dubiously legal, effectively unenforceable, or both. They also didn’t address the sketchy anticompetitive (and probably illegal) fee vouchers that were clearly an attempt to sink AppLovin, nor did they say anything about the sneaky license change they made a while ago to enable this whole snafu. The exec team, who are the ones who pushed this whole clusterfuck, are not going anywhere, and will probably try something stupid like this in the future.

Unity’s fucked. They’ve established that they’re unconcerned with business ethics, and are clearly willing to operate in bad faith towards business partners. They have destroyed any real trust the industry had in them. You can’t buy that back.

[–] excel@lemmy.megumin.org 92 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The damage was not the actual pricing (which was cheaper than Unreal), the reason people are going to leave for Unreal/Godot and never come back is the loss of trust. Nobody wants to be chained down to a company that’s willing to pull the rug out like this.

[–] Thann@lemmy.ml 21 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Every corporation that sells proprietary software will do this eventually. The only way to prevent it is by removing the need for trust and demanding open-source software!

[–] profdc9@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago

Many software companies in niche industries with few options end up being bought out by conglomerates or private equality which then turn the screws to their captive users.

[–] uskok@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Hashicorp recently switched Terraform's license from open source to a business license. Community forked it in a month. Source: opentofu.org

[–] FrederikNJS@lemm.ee 8 points 1 year ago

The new Unity pricing is not necessarily cheaper than Unreal. It depends on the price model for the game in question.

Many free-to-play games see massive amounts of installs, but very little average revenue per game. See of those devs did the math for their games, and found out that their average revenue per player was around 18 cents. So if Unity charges 20 cents per install, the dev would outright have to pay Unity 2 cents more than the player even gave them in revenue.

Some other devs calculated that the install fees would come out to 106% or the total revenue that their game had made.

Unreal's price model is generally 5% of revenue, so that would be significantly cheaper.

But it depends a lot on the actual price model for the game. Some games will pay rather little in install fees, while others will pay excessive amounts.

[–] nix@merv.news 59 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Unity does not respect their users at all

[–] underisk@lemmy.ml 41 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

They removed pure text that was almost certainly less than a GB of disk space and similarly negligible bandwidth cost that they weren’t even hosting themselves because not enough people looked at it. They just happened to realize this and ensure it was removed during a period of high public scrutiny and internal company strife that was relevant to the aforementioned TOS and the changes it’s repository tracked.

Anybody who trusts Unity after this is a mark.

[–] brsrklf@jlai.lu 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Less than a GB, yeah, I certainly hope so. Just imagine a ToS more than a billion character long.

Apparently King James Bible is around 3 million.

[–] underisk@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah I hedged a bit because idk how much metadata git stores or what kind of space that metadata takes up.

[–] Amir@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago

I'm gonna guess the entire repo is no larger than 30MB

[–] FLX@lemmy.world 27 points 1 year ago

WTF.

So they take YEARS to update/remove obsolete shit from the doc, even for important features. But somehow an obscure ToS page need to be fully deleted without leaving any trace because "low views" ?

Bullshit it's not only disrespect it's pure lies.

[–] AlecSadler@sh.itjust.works 25 points 1 year ago

That has to be the most bullshit explanation I've ever seen...this year. I can't believe the person that wrote it didn't cringe so hard they collapsed in on themselves.

[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world 48 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Abandon it. Fuck em. This was stupid. Scrap the whole thing.

[–] caseyweederman@lemmy.ca 9 points 1 year ago

Scrap the whole Unity.

[–] Xylinna@lemmy.world 44 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think the damage may already be done to Unity. Devs have been moving to alternatives like Unreal and I doubt this walk back would make them change their minds.

[–] Someguy89@lemmy.world 39 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nor should they change their minds. How do developers know they won't try this BS again? Trust has been eroded all for the sake of a quick profit. If I was a developer I wouldn't touch their products again.

[–] Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

This could even have cascading effects with others using similar business models. Relying on a product that a for profit company provides for free is risky, especially if the company is publically traded.

Though the real point I'm seeing in all of this is that there needs to be more regulation about "terms of service" and "end user agreements", rather than just letting companies say whatever and then letting the courts determine what flies when push comes to shove.

[–] winterayars@sh.itjust.works 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And there we have it, the inevitable outcome. Ask for something insane -> apologize and backtrack -> ask for something slightly more reasonable (which was the original desire all along they just thought they wouldn't get away with it in a vacuum). It's classic bs and i hope people don't buy it. Fuck Unity.

[–] the_inebriati@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

I don't buy this at all. The door-in-the-face strategy doesn't really work if it leaves the customer feeling like they'd rather get rid of the door and start over with a new door technology.

You can squeeze your customers in a way that doesn't make you look insane and Unity chose to not do that.

[–] autotldr@lemmings.world 8 points 1 year ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

A little more than a week after announcing a disastrous new pricing model that infuriated developers, Unity has introduced its revamped version.

So long as the developer did not update their version of Unity, newer terms of service wouldn’t apply.

Instead of charging per installation, Unity will now let developers choose: “For games that are subject to the runtime fee, we are giving you a choice of either a 2.5 percent revenue share or the calculated amount based on the number of new people engaging with your game each month.” The blog does not make clear what metric by which developers are supposed to calculate what to pay.

Throughout this rollout, users have asked how Unity will determine when a game has met download and revenue thresholds.

Developers were concerned that “proprietary software” was either unreliable, involved inserting unwanted DRM or would run afoul of privacy laws.

The company will be hosting a live “fireside chat” on YouTube to discuss the new policy on Friday at 4PM ET / 1PM PT.

The original article contains 616 words, the summary contains 169 words. Saved 73%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] luthis@lemmy.nz 7 points 1 year ago

That's hilarious. So is theirrecent stock pricing history

[–] Treczoks@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

I seriously hope this does not save them.